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Last September, more than 250 Harvard students flocked across the Charles River to compete in the Computer Science 50 Puzzle Day. After hours of solving puzzles and logic problems, three teams emerged from the Science and Engineering Complex victorious — with more than $1,000 of Meta merchandise in hand.

Meta, which has sponsored the Puzzle Day for almost 15 years, is just one of the many tech companies that support courses at Harvard. Professors at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have repeatedly collaborated with companies — like Amazon, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft — to secure technical support for their students.

SEAS has a “number of contracts” with Amazon, according to Jim H. Waldo, the Chief Technology Officer at the school.

“We’ve been using Amazon Web Services for years, probably ten or more,” he said. “We just reach out to the people that we know there who are in charge of dealing with academic institutions and talk to them on a case-by-case basis.”

The partnership originated because the course Computer Science 109A: Introduction to Data Science required large computational power.

“We, in the computing group, approached Amazon at the time,” Waldo said. “We approached them to see if they would be willing to give us credits for this class.”

For classes that want to use AWS — a cloud computing platform — the professors contact the department’s computing staff, who then communicate with Amazon directly to arrange a distribution of credits.

“It is always associated with a class,” he said. “It’s not for particular students, although sometimes the students may need to sign up in some way, but the credits are all just gifts from Amazon.”

These credits allow students to pursue much larger-scale projects that Waldo said would not otherwise be possible.

Computer science concentrator Justin Liu ’27 said that he appreciates the school’s partnership with tech companies.

“I think it’s nice that students have the opportunity to work on ambitious projects that require a lot of compute power, without having to worry about where to find those compute credits from,” he said.

Waldo said that the partnership increases Amazon’s visibility in campus settings.

“From Amazon’s point of view, I think the main thing that they get out of this is students being used to Amazon and when they need in the future large amounts of computing, they’ll turn to Amazon as a framework that they understand and know how to use,” Waldo said.

An enterprise account manager at Amazon who works with clients in higher education did not respond to a request for comment on the company’s relationship with Harvard.

Amazon is not the only big-tech company with a presence in Harvard’s classrooms. This spring, “COMPSCI 1060: Software Engineering with Generative AI” offered students free Codeium credits. And students enrolled in the class “AC 215: Advanced Practical Data Science” had access to Google’s computer platform.

CS50, however, remains the largest class with corporate sponsorships.

The popular introductory computer science class lists companies such as Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, GitHub, and Visual Studio Code as its partners.

Julia J. Poulson ’26, a former CS50 student, said that she found the partnerships helpful.

“I actually think they used it in a very good way that made the class really accessible to people,” she said, referring to VS Code.

“They had their own graders that were easy to access and in VS Code. Lots of commands that they had programmed that made it easy to check your work, and that kind of abstracted away a lot of the complex language,” she added.

AWS has supported CS50’s cloud usage since 2008 when instructor David J. Malan ’99 moved the course onto cloud.

“Although Amazon supported our experiment financially with credits, it was not without costs,” Malan wrote in a research paper, citing the technical difficulties with the move. But even with the initial struggles, Malan wrote that “the upsides proved worth it.”

As the course has expanded its corporate partnerships, Malan wrote in a statement to The Crimson that all sponsorships “have been initiated on our end.”

“Typically, I’ve reached out to alumni or others in industry when we’ve caught a glimpse of some technology that we think could improve students’ or TFs’ experience in CS50,” Malan wrote.

“These collaborations enable CS50’s students or TFs and CAs to learn and leverage technology that we might not otherwise have access to,” he added.

Professor Christopher A. Thorpe ’97-’98, who teaches CS 1060, also spoke positively of his partnership with Codeium, an AI-powered coding assistant.

“Although it’s not a formal partnership, Codeium generously sponsored their Pro plan for our students and course staff for six months,” Thorpe wrote in a statement. “This was at no cost to Harvard or our students.”

Akshat Agarwal, who works at Codeium as part of their product and growth team, said that the company is trying to make “the technology as accessible as possible.”

“If you look at our history as a company, we really strive to bring down the cost and we’ve given away a lot of stuff for free, and that’s definitely a future goal,” he said.

Lucas Chu ’23-’25, who is a teaching fellow for CS 1060 and a Codeium campus ambassador, helped facilitate the partnership with the class.

“I learned that Codeium was offering complimentary access to Harvard Computer Science students and requested accounts for the class, which was approved,” he wrote in a statement. “This presented a valuable opportunity for our students.”

Thorpe wrote that while “our first priority is our students’ learning,” the corporate sponsorship had benefits for everyone.

“This is a win-win-win for the corporate sponsor, the university, and above all, the students,” Thorpe wrote.

—Staff writer Xinni (Sunshine) Chen can be reached at sunshine.chen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sunshine_cxn.

—Staff Writer Danielle J. Im can be reached at danielle.im@thecrimson.com.